| Artist: | Dali, Salvador |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Invisible Man | |
| Date of Work: | 1929-1931 | |
| Nationality: | Spanish | |
| Context: | Post-War Fantasy | |
| Movement: | Surrealism | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: "The invisible Man" is a classic example of Dali's paranoiac-critical method. Dali believed that paranoid schizophrenics see more than the rest of us do; they have the hallucinatory power to see dual images, to spot the latent in the manifest. So he set out to formulate a method by which he could consciously induce a similar state of delirium. He called it the paranoiac-critical method, which he defined as "a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations." In this typical Dali hallucinatory image, one thing liquidly metamorphosizes into another, from hard into soft forms and from one substance into another, but here an odd figure/ground shift comes into play as well. What emerges is a latent figure: the "Invisible Man." Dali began to use this method as a system for undermining waking logic and conventional systematic thinking. "I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possile . . . to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality." Style: Dali, like Magritte, uses a realistic style to de-rail reality. He employs a lucid dream technique by using an almost Old Master precisionist style. Unlike Magritte, however, Dali does not seem innocent, even on the surface. The latent subtext of sexual fears and anxieties comes through even in the manifest content. Characteristic of psychic automatism (the undirected play of thought), one image metamorphosizes into another. But here Dali also makes use of a consciously calculated way to simulate paranoiac vision through a "system" of deliberately induced delirium and irrationality that plays on a figure/ground double reading of the latent vs. manifest content. Dali is never abstract in style, but his content is doubly disturbing and puzzling here. The paranoiac-critical method encourages one to read surface vs. depth, conscious vs. unconscious, manifest vs. latent. It becomes Dali's weapon for upsetting the assured mindset that we bring to perceived, waking reality. And reality turns out to be much more hallucinatory, irrational, and subject to personal desire and paranoia than it is objective. Dali pits the rational, reasoning mind against the imaginative and fantastic, and it is the poetry of the unconscious and a "convulsive beauty" that win in the end. "My whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialize the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision." Context: In conjunction with the paranoaic-critical method, Dali wrote a treatise titled: "Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and the Rights of Man to his own Madness." Dali's stated desire "to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality" made him an instant star among the Surrealists, until he proved to be too surreal even for their tastes. By 1934, he was officially censored and ex-communicted from the movement. In 1940, he goes Hollywood, working for Hitchcock on the movie, "Spellbound." Commercially successful, the art world turned on him, complaining that he had sold out and that his art had become too chic and self-consciously contrived. Some called his work illustrational, nothing more than "hand painted dream photographs." His overtly Freudian themes rendered in a precisionist style do contrast sharply from the abstract dream imagery of his fellow Spaniard, Miro, whose art is more an example of dream painting than painted dreams. But Dali's youthful works from around 1930 are still classic examples of the surreal aesthetic of "convulsive beauty" and the "marvelous," drawn from dream imagery and a Freudian-inspired exploration of the unconscious and even paranoaia as valid sources for creativity. | ||
